My user base is less computer savvy and they tend to change the template files if they have access to them.

If they're smart enough to find the templates, I say they are computer savvy :D

Any what

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict; use warnings;
use Data::Dump qw' pp ';
use File::Slurp qw' read_file ';
use autodie qw' chdir open ';
chdir 'templates directory';
open my($fh), '>:raw', 'MahTemplates.pl';
select $fh;
print '%templates = (', "\n";
for my $file ( glob '*.xml' ){
    print dd(
        $file,
        scalar
        read_file(
            $file,
            { binmode => ':raw' }
        )
    ), "\n";
}
print "\n);\n";
close $fh;
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